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Chatroulette craze brings out the Web cam creeps

You never know who you'll meet on the webcam. Some creep pretending to be the Jonas Brothers asked me to show him my boobs on Chatroulette the other day.

Reporter Nicole Baute, above, talks to someone pretending to be a Jonas brother. The impostor used real video without sound and typed the chat.

By Nicole BauteLiving Reporter

Thu., March 4, 2010

Some creep pretending to be the Jonas Brothers asked me to show him my boobs on Chatroulette the other day.

I declined, if you're wondering. But the experience, like most of my brief foray into the wild world of Chatroulette, left me rattled.

The new bare-bones Internet chat program, invented by a 17-year-old whiz kid in Moscow, connects users by webcam with one random stranger after another. With an air of I-can-do-something-crazier-than-you exhibitionism, the game is both a throwback to the days of 1990s chat rooms and a step toward a brave new world of international web intimacy.

Plug in your webcam, go to www.chatroulette.com and hit "play" to give the imaginary wheel a spin. You might find yourself facing a chubby guy with his hand down his pants, a man in a mask brandishing a large knife, or a lonely French golf instructor who just wants to talk. Chat with them, or don't. All you have to do is hit the "next" button. With more than 20,000 people online at a time, there are plenty of pickings.

When I met the fake Jonas Brothers I had been fumbling through the social media free-for-all for less than an hour, hitting "next" in sheer terror every time I encountered a pervert. (Many exchanges went something like this: "Hi." "Hey." "Ça va?" "I'm fine, thanks." "Sex?" "No, thanks." Next.)

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One minute I was talking to a pimple-faced kid crunching on an apple in a Minnesota kitchen, and the next, the Jonas brothers appeared.

Joe Jonas appeared annoyed at my failure to recognize him. "Don't you know who we are?" popped up in the text chat. "Jonas Brothers. Google it."

I did, and asked them what they were doing on Chatroulette.

"Show us something," came the response.

"Like what?" I asked.

"Boobs," he suggested.

I declined, and then scolded them. When they nexted me, I couldn't really blame them.

But I was shaken: in the short time I had been on Chatroulette, I had chatted and made webcam eye contact with a few dozen complete strangers, including a handful of perverts and not-the-Jonas Brothers. I felt like a protective layer had been ripped off and, frightened by the social rawness of it all, I didn't want to play anymore.

The next day a spokesperson for the Jonas Brothers told me the video I had seen was taken from a web chat they did on Sept. 15, 2007.

"I'm sorry you had this dreadful experience and want to reassure you Jonas Brothers would never comport themselves in this manner," she wrote in an email.

Andrey Ternovskiy, the precocious mastermind behind Chatroulette, admits users with some technical know-how can replace their webcam feeds with other videos.

What does Ternovskiy think about all the sex?

"Ah, well, I didn't really want a pornography site," the teenager said, adding it's roulette, so users have to be prepared for anything.

Creeps can be reported and thousands of people are booted off the site each day. But some people are able to stay on, he said.

Mark Federman, a researcher at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education who studies social media, said Chatroulette is a bit like a funhouse – you never know what's around the corner.

"People who participate in Chatroulette do so partly for the thrill, the unknown, the who knows whether it's going to be somebody dressed up in a cat costume, some couple having sex or just some, as most of it is, boring guys in their dorm rooms."

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